Yesterday, I was hired to fill in for an hour-long after-school elementary keyboard class at a state-run schooling institution. Freelance music teaching is one of the sources of income I manage to successfully juggle and fit into my schedule when an opportunity to apply it for profit arises.

I was representing a well-reputed music school whom the elementary school had contracted with. I’ve worked with this same music school off and on for years. They’ve grown through experience to trust my consistent punctuality, professionalism, and expertise in the subject. When they call me, they expect me to get the job done in the most efficient manner possible with a minimal of errors and sub-par aspects of service. As both they and I know, arriving late or leaving customers and student dissatisfied means a potential loss in income and standard of living for all of us. The fear of loss of positive reputation keeps us both functioning at peak performance. In the years we’ve been working together, I have seldom let them down.

I wish I could say the same common sense code of conduct toward others was followed by every institution. When I arrived at the public elementary school, I found myself trapped in their poorly managed parking lot. Despite arriving at the school 20 minutes prior to the scheduled time for the music class to begin, I was stuck in place surrounded on all sides by dozens or hundreds of cars full of parents waiting to pick their kids up as the school day ended. The parking lot traffic was directed in such a way that once I had gone in through the entrance, their was no way for me to backtrack and exit the standstill mess of cars and park on the street outside, nor could I maneuver myself ahead of the waiting cars so I could leave while they stayed.

The level of incompetence here astounded me. Maybe it’s because I go out of my way to avoid dealing professionally with the tax-funded public sector as often as possible, but I had naturally assumed that an institution which functions nine months out of the year with regularly scheduled pickup and drop-off times would have implemented a parking and traffic system within their borders which ensured at least a minimalist standard of functionality. I ended up being stuck in place with cars on all sides of me for 30 minutes and was late to my class despite having arrived 20 minutes earlier than scheduled. Even then, it was still easier to park on the street than in the parking lot I had so patiently waited for access to. Even a simple sign placed outside the entrance warning of the lack of parking availability would have enabled me to completely circumnavigate the situation and spare the half hour of my life which had been robbed away by negligence of the part of others.

I passed by the principal of the school on my way to my classroom and expressed to her in my hurry how upset I was over having been made to 30 minutes for no other reason than the fact that they had not designed the traffic flow of their parking lot to be able to enter and exit with ease. A few condescending remarks indicating that the problem had already been “fixed” and that I shouldn’t be telling them how to run their school on my first visit when all the regular parents knew to arrive extremely early to pick up their kids there only solidified my contention that the people running this place were complete morons.

I know the way one school which I will never work at again (I assure you) poorly runs itself should not bother me as much as this one did. It continues to bother me though because I know that this was by no means an exception to the overall rule of a well-run and efficient society. Wherever there is not a direct correlation between the ability to perform and the remuneration granted, unnecessary faults and losses will inevitably slip through the cracks without recourse or restitution. No matter how efficient and streamlined I work to make my life and productive output into the world, I will continue to remain subject to the inadequacies of others who do not compete freely in the market and earn their right to proffer goods and services through an exceptional history of fulfilling promises and surpassing expectations.

I work harder everyday to earn space and time in the lives of higher quality individuals who demand and reciprocate the rewards of a job well done in all endeavors. I often take the time to envision how much more efficient a society where every function was organized and continually improved by profit-seeking entities which only received income when they performed their chosen function better than the available competition. I think of how much more quickly people and goods could be transported across roads maintained by a company which had a monetary incentive to minimize traffic and travel time. I think about how education institutions would look if the salaries of the educators were determined by how well the students learned. I think of healthcare in a world where doctors were rewarded by how healthy they kept their patients, not how often they allowed them to get sick or the amount of medication prescribed. I imagine one day being able to enjoy a truly comfortable and convenient airline boarding process and flight.

The future could be as bright as we choose to make it. We’ve a long way to go, but the potential is limitless when principles of competency are enacted everywhere in society. Our lives will all be richer because of it.

I found this in my inbox this morning. It’s one the best and most succinct explanations I’ve ever seen of how inflation or “the hidden tax” is robbing everyone daily. The scam is transparent when you know what to look for.

Peter McCandless is a good guy. He first invited me to be a guest on his weekly radio show many months ago while I was abroad in China teaching English. He had found me through one of my articles posted online regarding the nature of liberty and true individual freedom. We’ve developed a certain on-air inter-generational bond through the commonality of our views on society, education, parenting, politics, and economics.

On the latest show we did together, we talked about the importance of making money. Many people have strong opinions on making money and their own personal reasons for them, but I’d like to share mine. It’s simple: you need to get rich because money is the most effective tool for changing the world. Without capital, it will be damn near impossible to achieve a wide audience for your message.

This even works in multiple dimensions, because through purposeful entrepreneurship we can make a profound influence on society both in the process of making money and spending it. You vote with your dollars- both when you distribute them and when you receive them in exchange for your purposeful production.

I’ve received the same message countless times from my own boss at Baja123, David Biondolillo and his son Kanoa. In fact, I quote David in this very interview about 47 minutes in. Here is the same quote again:

“I think one of the most important concepts that needs to be taught is that everyone is an entrepreneur already… whether they realize it or like it or not.

Everyone that wakes up each day on this planet is the president of their own company. Once everyone realizes this the next step for them is to ask themselves ‘How is my company doing?’. At the lowest level most companies don’t have even one client. Moving up the ladder, the next largest group has one client and they learn to ask a question like ‘Would you like fries with that?’.

What the world needs is a huge group of individuals who realize that they need ‘multiple streams of income’ so they are not dependent on an employer for their livelihood. Everyone is able to create multiple products that are either material or intellectual and find a market for them. This is the way to get out of the ‘rat race’.”

I believe what he have here is called a “win-win” scenario. Not only does the entrepreneur get to improve the quality of his own life by making enough money to start living life on his own terms (outside of the “rat race”), but he also improves the state of the world and his species by making available valuable products and services to the public. Entrepreneurs are to be celebrated in any rational comprehension of society.

I’ll be hosting the Peter Mac Show for the next two weeks (5/30 and 6/6) while Peter is out of town. My guest on 5/30 will be Jayant Bhandari, who puts on a seminar every year in Vancouver, Canada in celebration of ethical capitalism and entrepreneurship. Learn more about this year’s Capitalism and Morality seminar happening on July 28, 2012 here: http://www.jayantbhandari.com/Seminar2012/

And tune in this Wednesday from 5:00 to 6:00 p.m. Pacific time to hear me and Jayant on the Peter Mac Show: http://petermacshow.com/. We’d love to have you call in and share your thoughts.

For most people, the obvious answer is money. Almost everyone I know seems to struggle to make as much as possible and spend as little as they can manage to. They view dollars as life’s most valuable commodity and worth working themselves to death over. And still, they just barely seem to manage to make ends meet and maintain a balanced personal budget.

Someone who has really learned to value their own existence holds time as their unwavering master. Anyone can through proper diet and lifestyle attempt to extend the total amount of years in their lifetime. But no matter what you do, you cannot change the amount of time in a day. We are all given the same number of minutes in every hour to spend as frivolously or as finickly as we desire.

Because we are able to increase the amount of money in our lives but not the amount of time, it makes far more sense to say that time is life’s scarcest resource. The only thing we can alter through effort is the quality of the experience occurring within the passage of time. Valuing time over money ultimately makes a very sharp distinction over the quality of life experienced and the amount of wealth accumulated.

What is your time worth to you? A dollar is always just a dollar, and in fact inevitably only loses value as all fiat currencies do through the arbitrary printing of more leading to unavoidable hyperinflation. The value of your time though is entirely dependent on the choices you make with it. Most people will take the necessary precautions and utilize discretion when making a monetary purchase to ensure that they always get their money’s worth. I have only ever known a few people who use such discretion to ensure their time is always being filled with what it’s worth.

Just how much is your time worth? That’s entirely up to you. It is mostly a question of self-esteem, really. The higher your self-esteem, the more you will value your time, the more picky you will be about the activities you choose to engage in, the more demanding you will be over the integrity of your friends and acquaintances, the more punctual you will be and the more you will rightfully expect punctuality in return, and the larger monetary return you will demand for every hour of productivity you engage in at your work. The higher your opinion of yourself, the more you will naturally seek to leverage your time for the greatest possible gain.

Pick a number right now as you own arbitrary evaluation of what an hour of your time is worth. It can be anywhere from a single measly dollar to many thousands. I know what it is for me at present. Now ask yourself what you have to do to receive that amount in exchange for your time from someone individually or many people collectively willing to offer it in exchange.

Maybe you’ve over-estimated your worth to other people and selected an unattainably high price for your time. Maybe, like most people, you’ve adopted a self-defeating attitude toward life and will accept the bare minimum required for sustenance. You’ll have to experiment to learn where the balance falls between expectation and reality. If you do your job right, your subjective evaluation of your time should only increase as more time passes and you acquire the tools of production necessary to continually leverage it.

The only way to get rich or ensure the maximum quality of life for yourself is to value your time slightly more everyday than you did the day before. Where this evaluation peaks is entirely up to you, but technology has only made it easier to keep growing sustainably and indefinitely if you know how to use it. You should have clearly defined long and short term goals and be able to ask yourself in every moment “Am I getting closer to achieving my goals through my actions in this moment?”. If the answer isn’t a clear “Yes” at least half the time, you need to start reassessing your time management abilities and aspirations.

Taking pride in your time, your scarcest resource, will change your life immensely. You won’t waste as many hours on fruitless errands. You’ll learn from your mistakes faster and repeat them less often. You’ll become a better judge of character and avoid the people who disrespect your time. You’ll learn to automate whatever aspects of your life you can. You’ll learn to optimize your ability to live. Money (or the goods and services it equates to) can always be produced. Time, however, is a one-shot deal.

In human minds, there occurs a destructive rivalry whenever two or more conflicting ideas are subscribed to simultaneously. We experience our lives as thoughtful creatures, co-existing in two separate worlds which function in entirely different ways. The tangible world we live in composes our bodies and constantly rearranges itself through natural processes under unchanging standards of action and form. A thing either is or it is not, but never both; objects fall up or they fall down, but never both; energy behaves in one way or in another, but never both. All physical phenomena are without exception either possible or impossible.

The intangible world of our thoughts is not subject to this same governance against mutual exclusivity in occurrence, and it is because of this discrepancy between the tangible and intangible worlds that we carry strong potential for insanity and despair. We are capable of thinking thoughts and holding beliefs which grossly contradict one another, and this contradiction will often go uncorrected even when attention has been called to it by an outside source. We are highly imaginative, and while this imagination has granted us access to incredible new designs and ideas about the physical systems which compose our world, when left unchecked it runs wild and damages our fragile psyches.

If one should expect that his actions in the physical world will bring about a particular series of changes in favor of his arbitrary desires, he will accordingly feel disappointment and sadness if those expectations and ideas prove to be false means and untruths about such physical systems. For this reason, it behooves every individual to constantly keep his thoughts about reality in check against actual observation of the world around him so that he might avoid as much disappointment in his actions as is practical and achieve his goals with greatest the efficiency in action.

This problem is incomprehensibly compounded when not only do we lack the correct ideas about which courses of action bring about the changes we desire in the universe, but we also lack consistency in what our desires are to begin with. The original source of great psychological imbalances and emotional depravity lies in the simple question, “What do I really want?” And what a stupendously useful inquiry it is, if it can ever be answered.

It seems such a simple thing to be aware of what one wants. Yet we find we are constantly drawn toward courses of action which negate previous progress in the attainment of one goal, all in favor of another which cannot simultaneously exist with the first. In trying to stretch ourselves in opposing directions, we end up back exactly where we started in worse shape than before. For the purpose of living a fulfilling life, it becomes primarily important to discover what one wants most, then to go about learning the principles which will allow him to shape the tangible universe into a close approximation of that deepest intangible desire.

What We Really Want

I believe that the answer to the inquiry of a person’s deepest desires lies in their fundamental identity, their most core ego and sense of self. I believe this fundamental identity is inherent to a person in their physical architecture, meaning that it is present even since before birth, and that any actions taken towards developing it are in reality acts of remembering and discovering what is already there.

As we age and come to maturity in our respective environments, this natural design, unique and innate to each person, becomes obscured by the various nuances of his or her unnatural and unhealthy upbringing. One develops clouds in judgment, remains ignorant of what his natural proclivity is, and ultimately becomes emotionally and psychologically addicted to certain false desires which remain forever elusive and counter to his original design. These false drives may lead on him on a lifelong wild goose chase in search of something unreal and forever unfulfilling. At the moment he reaches culmination of one false idol, he realizes and replaces it with yet another waiting in a long line of dead-end dreams and straw-man philosophies.

The battle most men wage their entire lives is against the utter insanity wrought upon them by their inability to differentiate true desires from false desires, and furthermore true means towards attaining them from false means. This constant searching leaves man in a state of perpetual mental motion, and he is never able to rest. In the most severe cases, he may very well lose his mind beyond repair in this process and will certainly pass on these traits to his children during their own upbringing. The whole world is consequently going mad.

There must be a break in the chain at some point in the lineage of generations. Some individuals at some time must make the choice to challenge the illusion and see what remains beneath their phony fantasies. This break in frantic motion causes upset in the mind, making a man see the pain and emotion he has been attempting to avoid through his chronic pursuits of fantasy. The real desires he holds are what remains when all fear of pain is relinquished, what stays with him out of a genuine drive to take action toward enhancement and empowerment instead of a flight from fear.

This process is often called awakening. It is how a person comes to know who they really are for the first time in their lives, not what the inherited voices have been dictating for him. When a man forgets all the labels he once identified himself by, all the false promises of reward he made, all the comforts he has grown used to, then and only then does he see himself through the veil. Then and only then can he gain a complete understanding of his true desires and begin to take action toward them without interference or hesitation. From this final release of desperation comes his greatest inspiration.

Emergence

For too long I’ve allowed the false desires, these radical sicknesses, to run my life and ruin my chances of a happiness attained through true means. I’ve been lost in illusion, and though I’ve gained increasingly greater clarity of my own self and desires, this illusion has kept some hold over my actions and psyche. In the moments where I saw the greatest clarity, where my truest desires began to manifest in my life, I was bombarded with baggage from the past which threatened to distract me once more from what I really wanted. My schizophrenic mind was bent on self-destruction and return into endless illusory pursuits.

I believe a person does not really enter adulthood until he knows himself and has made the conscience dedication toward foregoing all past distractions. I believe he is reborn in the moment he understands that he has been his own worst enemy the whole time, and that in this moment he becomes free for the first time in his life to really consciously choose what he will do with his life. He returns to a state of clarity, there are no more questions here, only passion, purpose, and focus.

An unrivaled mind is a rare thing in the world today, a mind that can see clearly what it wants without conflicting desires or distraction and hesitation. It is also the most potent tool for humanity, for only an entirely unrivaled mind with have the clarity, dedication, and consistency required to see large projects through to their completion. There is no room for duality in the the mind of a real man. A man cannot live a life at ease until he has erased every demon and false desire from his past permanently. Then he will be free to ascend to entirely new heights and ideals, and free his children from the bonds of his tortuous past.